Bank CEOs Fear the Fiscal Cliff They Apparently Don’t Understand

My story in the magazine about Mitt Romney and Barack Obama’s economic policy plans explains how the “fiscal cliff” has entered the broader political lexicon in a way that badly distorts everybody’s thinking, and is often invoked to mean the exact opposite of what it really is. The fiscal cliff doesn’t refer to the deficit spiking, it refers to the deficit going away really, really fast, beginning on January1.

Republicans hate the fiscal cliff because it eliminates the deficit in ways they hate — mostly by ending all of the Bush tax cuts, along with some spending cuts that take a huge bite out of the Pentagon. But another group also hates the fiscal cliff for different reasons. The centrist anti-deficit groups funded by Pete Peterson hate the fiscal cliff because it creates an avenue for bringing revenue and outlays in line in a way that they don’t want. It basically creates a situation where the deficit is solved in ways that are more left-wing than even Obama proposes, giving him leverage to craft a solution largely along his own preferred lines, rather than through the “grand bargain” they have been fruitlessly trying to craft since 2010. And so they are issuing dire warnings about the fiscal cliff that are either completely disingenuous or reveal a total failure to understand what they’re complainingabout.

So, for instance, a group of financial executives, including JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, warns in a letter, “interest rates could spike significantly if policymakers do not agree to stop the series of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts and replace them with a long-term plan to tame the federal debt.” Uh, no, that is not how it works. Interest rates can spike when the deficit gets too high. The fiscal cliff involves the deficit getting very low very quickly. The problem is that it’s too quickly, and if it stays that way for months and months on end, it could throw the economy back into recession. But interest rates would remain very low in thatcase.

This sets up an interesting game of chicken. Republicans are hoping to use the fear of these economic consequences to force Obama to come to heel and extend the Bush tax cuts before January. Obama says he won’t do that. And if he doesn’t do that, we get to January, the deficit disappears, and it becomes very easy for the two sides to make some accommodation. (Obama could agree to cut tax rates, cut entitlement spending, and raise defense spending, and still wind up to the left of his ownproposal.)

The Peterson network appears determined to avoid that outcome. Dimon, a supporter of the Peterson backed “Fix the Debt,” argues, “Just take the fiscal cliff off the table. Some of the potential outcomes are very bad, and we shouldn’t take thatchance.”

But, of course, if the fiscal cliff is off the table, then Republicans have no incentive to cut a deal. Then we’re back to the same position we’ve been in: deficit scolds pleading with both sides to make a deal; the deal failing because Republicans care more about low taxes for the rich than anything else; and then the fiscal scolds blaming both sides for failing to make adeal.

If they actually wanted a deal to reduce the deficit, they would want to put everything off until January. Instead they’re saying a bunch of stuff that makes no sense. So either they just have no idea what is going on with the issue they’re claiming to care about more than anything else in the world, or they’re trying to give Republican anti-tax jihadists the leverage they will lose if Obama winsreelection.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his all for all. I have long agreed with his speeches and writings. Today I think of this MLK quote, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” May we renew ourselves in his teachings so that he can RIP.

Mexico suffered a record 33,341 homicides in 2018, according to official statistics released Monday, breaking the record set in 2017, as violence fueled by a war on the country’s powerful drug cartels plagues the country.

More than 200,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since the government controversially deployed the army to fight drug trafficking in 2006. The previous record was 28,866 homicides in 2017.

Team Trump reached out to the Special Counsel’s office after BuzzFeed News’ bombshell article last week

A source familiar with the matter tells @HallieJackson that on Friday morning, after the disputed BuzzFeed article dropped, the president’s legal team “raised concerns” in a letter to Mueller’s office. This was prior to the special counsel issuing its rare rebuke Friday evening.

During the summer of 2017, when temperatures reached triple digits in Arizona, four women drove to a vast desert wilderness along the southwestern border with Mexico. They brought water jugs and canned food — items they later said they were leaving for dehydrated migrants crossing the unfriendly terrain to get to the United States.

The women were later charged with misdemeanor crimes. Prosecutors said they violated federal law by entering Cabeza Prieta, a protected 860,000-acre refuge, without a permit and leaving water and food there. A judge convicted them on Friday in the latest example of growing tension between aid workers and the U.S. Border Patrol.

The Russian pop star at the middle of the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting has cancelled his U.S. tour

Emin Agalarov, the Russian pop star who is said to have helped arrange Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, said Monday he has been forced to cancel his tour of the United States and Canada “due to circumstances beyond [his] control.”

In a video on Facebook, Agalarov claimed he had nixed the upcoming tour “against his will.” His lawyer said in a telephone interview with NBC News that he doesn’t want his client coming to America under fear of being held under a material witness warrant. Agalarov had been scheduled to perform in New York on Saturday night.

If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed—along with most others. Will we learn from it, or will we continue to roam social media, looking for the next outrage fix? Next time a story like this surfaces, I’ll try to sit it out until more facts have emerged. I’ll remind myself that the truth is sometimes unknowable, and I’ll stick to discussing the news with people I know in real life, instead of with strangers whom I’ve never met. I’ll get my news from legitimate journalists instead of from an online mob for whom Saturday-morning indignation is just another form of entertainment. And above all, I’ll try to take the advice I give my kids daily: Put the phone down and go do something productive.

President Donald Trump’s social media accounts are filled with vile racism, idiotic xenophobia, and inaccurate statistics. And now we can add another category to the list: fake photos.

In recent months, Trump’s official Facebook and Instagram accounts have published photos of the president that have been manipulated to make him look thinner. If it only happened once you might be able to chalk it up as an accident. But Gizmodo has discovered at least three different retouched photos on President Trump’s social media pages that have been published since October of 2018.

The number of U.S. airport screeners who took unscheduled absences rose to 10 percent on Sunday, more than triple that of a year ago as the stalemate over the government shutdown continued over a holiday weekend, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

The number of unscheduled TSA absences hit the highest level seen so far, the TSA said in a statement Monday as the shutdown entered its 31st day. A year ago the absence rate was 3.1 percent.

Chris Christie goes after the “riffraff” in the Trump administration in a new excerpt from his memoir — Let Me Finish

Instead of high-quality, vetted appointees for key administration posts, he got the Russian lackey and future federal felon Michael Flynn as national security adviser. He got the greedy and inexperienced Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

He got the high-flying Tom Price as health and human services secretary. He got the not-ready-for-prime-time Jeff Sessions as attorney general, promptly recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russian-collusion probe. He got a stranger named Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. …

He got the Apprentice show loser Omarosa Manigault in whatever Omarosa’s job purported to be. (I never could figure that one out.) … Too few Kellyanne Conways. A boatload of Sebastian Gorkas. Too few Steven Mnuchins.

Bloomberg speech at @NationalAction DC breakfast a concerted effort to prove his life has focused on issues important African-American community, touching on education, environmental justice, lessons from father, and - above all - gun violence

Oxfam said the wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.

As a result, the report concluded, the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s population fell from 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. In 2016 the number was 61.

Senator Kamala Harris, the California Democrat and barrier-breaking prosecutor who became the second black woman to serve in the United States Senate, declared her candidacy for president on Monday, joining an increasingly crowded and diverse field in what promises to be a wide-open nomination process.

The announcement was bathed in symbolism: Ms. Harris chose to enter the race on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, an overt nod to the historic nature of her candidacy, and her timing was also meant to evoke Shirley Chisholm, the New York congresswoman who became the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president 47 years ago this week.

More details and context regarding Friday’s confrontation between a Native American drummer and Catholic school teens in D.C.

Nathan Phillips said in an interview with The Associated Press that he was trying to keep peace between some Kentucky high school students and a black religious group that was also on the National Mall on Friday. The students were participating in the March for Life, which drew thousands of anti-abortion protesters, and Phillips was attending the Indigenous Peoples March happening the same day.

“Something caused me to put myself between (them) — it was black and white,” said Phillips, who lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. “What I saw was my country being torn apart. I couldn’t stand by and let that happen.”

Videos show a youth standing very close to Phillips and staring at him as he sang and played the drum. Other students — some in “Make America Great Again” hats and sweatshirts — were chanting, laughing and jeering. Other videos also showed members of the religious group, who appear to be affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, yelling disparaging and profane insults at the students, who taunt them in return. Video also shows the Native Americans being insulted by the small religious group as well. …

In a joint statement , the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School apologized and said they are investigating and will take “appropriate action, up to and including expulsion. … We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips … This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”

Sign of the times, 30 days into the longest government shutdown in American history

GoFundMe starts its own effort to assist federal workers hit by the shutdown. Employees of world’s most powerful nation “are being forced to work without pay and line up at diaper or food banks,” said GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon. “It makes no sense.” https://t.co/aQDYv0EmwZ

Cohen’s lie about the timeline of a project regarding a big skyscraper with Trump’s name on it didn’t catch Donald Trump’s attention, according to Giuliani

Mr. Giuliani said that when Mr. Cohen testified to Congress that the project had ended in January 2016, Mr. Trump simply “accepted” that answer.

“The president couldn’t tell you the exact day it started and the exact day it ended; he remembers it started and he remembers it ended,” Mr. Giuliani said, but nothing more. “It never got to anything concrete.”

“We’re being told to stand our ground. Our reporting is going to be borne out to be accurate, and we’re 100% behind it,” [Cormier explained to host Brian Stelter]. … [The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist], who wouldn’t reveal his sources when asked, said the story had been in the works for months and went through a “rigorous” vetting process. The story was reviewed by at least three editors, Smith said. …

Smith said BuzzFeed is “eager” to understand which parts of the report Mueller’s office is challenging as inaccurate. He said BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold, who coauthored the story, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for details on how the statement from Mueller’s office was constructed. …

Journalist Carl Bernstein, a CNN political analyst, told Stelter on Sunday that he thought it was “going to take time before we fully understand what the exact truth is here.”

An intentionally misrepresented solution to an intentionally misrepresented crisis

A Republican senator who encouraged President Donald Trump to pursue a compromise with congressional Democrats to end the partial government shutdown described the White House’s offer this weekend as “a straw man proposal” that is not intended to become law.

“What I encouraged the White House to do and multiple others encouraged the White House to do is put out a proposal,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Sunday during an interview with host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”

“They’ve listened to a lot of Democrat and Republican members for the last month. They’ve heard all the demands, they know all the background on it,” said Lankford, a member of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“Put out a straw man proposal. Get something out there the president can say, ‘I can support this’ — and has elements from both sides. Put it on the table, then open it up for debate.”

Rudy Giuliani was “defending” the president on the Sunday morning shows again this week, and it’s gone about as well as you’d expect.

On CNN”s State of the Union, Giuliani said, “As far as I know, President Trump did not have discussions with [Michael Cohen about his Congressional testimony] — Certainly no discussions with him in which he told him or counseled him to lie.” But he also acknowledged, “I don’t know if it happened or it didn’t happen… I have no knowledge if he spoke to him,” before adding, “And so what if he talked to him about it?”

“If he had any discussions with him, they’d be about the version of the events that Michael Cohen gave them which they all believe was true,” Giuliani also explained, and angrily accused host Jake Tapper of having “hysteria” after Tapper said he wanted to learn the truth about the Cohen-Trump interactions. “You should all be careful,” Giuliani said.

On Meet the Press, Giuliani was “100 percent certain” that Trump did not ask Cohen to lie.

“I can tell you his counsel to Michael Cohen throughout that entire period was, ‘Tell the truth,’ he added. “We thought he was telling the truth. I still believe he may have been telling the truth when he testified before Congress,”

Giuliani also admitted on MTP that Trump’s discussions about building a Trump Tower in Moscow went on “throughout 2016”, and possibly even into November — even though Trump said then and later that he had no business with Russia.

“It’s our understanding that [the Trump Tower Moscow talks] went on throughout 2016, not a lot of them, but there were conversations, can’t be sure of the exact date. … Probably up to — could be up to as far as October, November.”

1) Threatened to hunt down and deport DACA recipients if Democrats don’t accept his offer to temporarily cancel his cancellation of DACA, while also assuring the (pissed-off) far right that the deal doesn’t include amnesty, while also suggesting full amnesty would be an option sometime later, if he gets what he wants.

2) Used the severe winter weather striking much of the U.S. to make fun of climate change (which is causing more severe weather, year-round).

4) Made another effort to dominate Pelosi in response to her cancellation of his State of the Union speech, insisting he has “so many options” which include “doing it as per your written offer (made during the Shutdown, security is no problem), and my written acceptance,” whatever that is supposed to mean.